Thursday, August 03, 2017

Dark Money and the new American politics

Last weekend I finished Dark Money by Jane Mayer, which appeared
last year.It was marketed, largely, as
a history of the involvement of the fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch
in American politics over the last few decades, but it is much more than
that.I intend in what follows to
summarize what I found in the book, but from a slightly different perspective than
Mayer’s, and without much of any attention to the voluminous, and fascinating,
personal data that she provides about the Kochs and other financiers of our new
“conservative” political movement.Instead I am going to treat the book as the first draft, as it were, of
a genuine political history of the last 40 or 50 years—because it explains more
about where we are and how we got here than anything else that I have ever
read.Mayer leads her readers through
the story in rough chronological order, and I recommend the book to
everyone.I on the other hand am going
to try to identify its major features in an effort to explain how we got to the
miserable point at which we find ourselves.

Charles and David Koch are the
most striking example of extraordinarily wealthy Americans who have had an
outsized impact on the politics of the last forty years—and whose impact is
reaching a new peak right now.They
followed in the footsteps of their father Fred, who in the 1950s was one of the
founding members, along with candy manufacturer Robert Welch, of the John Birch
Society.Nothing illustrates what has
happened to American politics in my lifetime in more striking fashion than
this.The ideas of the John Birch
Society, a group of fanatically anti-government lunatics who in the 1950s
identified Dwight D. Eisenhower as a member of the international Communist
conspiracy, are now the single most influential set of ideas in American
political life. Their main tenets are an unlimited faith in free enterprise and
a conviction that government attempts to moderate the negative impacts of
capitalism are simply a power grab designed to establish dictatorship.And because of the success of their political
movement, their fortunes have grown by orders of magnitude over the last few
decades.

In addition to the Kochs, the superrich
political elite has included John Olin, a chemical manufacturer; Richard Mellon
Scaife, a scion of a Pittsburgh family prominent in banking and industry; and Harry
Bradley, another Birch Society acolyte who ran the Allen-Bradley Electronics
Company in New York.In the middle of
the twentieth century, when marginal income tax rates topped out at 91%, these
men had all taken advantage of a provision in the tax code—first used by the
Rockefeller family—to create a “philanthropic” foundation to shield substantial
portions of their enormous income from taxes.Unfortunately, the definition of philanthropy has been broad enough to
include the subsidy of a particular ideology—and ultimately, direct
intervention in politics.That one
tragic flaw in our tax code has reshaped opinion and redistributed power at
every level of American government.

Now I have rarely been impressed by
any of the ideas coming out of the new Right during the last few decades, but
like many liberal Democrats, I suspect, I have assumed that conservative
intellectuals had honestly come by their ideas.I am not suggesting now that they have lied about them, but Mayer leaves
no doubt that the entire new right wing intellectual establishment was created
from the ground up by the handful of major benefactors listed above.Both the American Enterprise Institute and
the Heritage Foundation—the two centers of conservative “thought” in Washington—were
originally funded largely by Richard Mellon Scaife. The Bradley and Olin
Foundations were also powers behind the Heritage Foundation, and the Kochs have
been involved as well.I have always
thought of the Cato Institute as a nest of principled libertarians—partly
because it tends to oppose foreign interventions—but it turns out to have been
started by Charles Koch.Charles Murray
was an unknown writer before the Olin foundation adopted him and subsidized his
first book, Losing Ground, arguing
that social programs were hurting the poor.(Spoiled, perhaps, by success, Murray went a bridge too far when he and
Richard Herrnstein argued in The Bell
Curve that black people were intellectually inferior to whites.)And I was amazed to learn from Mayer that the
Bradley foundation gives four annual awards of $250,000 each to leading
conservative journalists, activists, and intellectuals. Winners have included
George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Heather
MacDonald, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, John Bolton, William Kristol,
Paul Gigot, Michael Barone, Jeb Bush, Harvey Mansfield, Edwin Meese, Roger
Ailes of Fox News, General John Keane, and Charles Murray.

Changing the intellectual climate was step 1 in the
program.Another spectacularly
successful front was opened within the American legal system, Started in 1982
with money from the Olin Foundation and affiliates of the Scaifes and the
Kochs, the Federalist Society has become a behemoth, an organization of
conservative legal thinkers that includes all the conservative members of the
US Supreme Court.That is not all. The Olin
Foundation has sponsored two week seminars on Law and Economics for sitting
judges, somewhat reminiscent of the seminars drug companies hold for physicians
at major resorts.There they have
exposed sitting judges to the evils of regulation and the glories of the free
market—and this may explain some of the more extraordinary decisions that
federal courts have handed down lately, such as one that limited the legal
definition of insider trading to narrowly as to make most prosecutions for it
impossible.

Nor is this all: the foundations have not hesitated to
challenge liberal intellectuals in their own presumed stronghold,
universities.Using the irresistible
lever of their wealth—which no American university, in this day and age, can resist—they
have established beachheads such as the Olin Center at Harvard University
(promoting conservative ideas on foreign policy) and several institutes at
George Mason University, conveniently located in the Washington suburbs.These have opened career paths for
conservative public policy intellectuals—at the same time that mainstream
academic departments have been going in directions largely irrelevant to real
politics.

This vast intellectual infrastructure works in tandem, of
course, with the right wing media, led by Fox News and Clear Channel Radio, to
shift public opinion on key events.The
alternative media outlets are largely self-financing, of course, but I was very
surprised that another key rightwing organization, Freedom Works—funded largely
by the Scaife foundation—had paid Glenn Beck more than $1 million a year to
allow them to write his monologues.And
this infrastructure has not only convinced many Americans, and probably most
better-off Americans, that social programs do more harm than good, but it has
also convinced millions that lower taxes on the wealthy increase economic
growth—and, critically, created real doubt as to whether man-made global
warming exists.Mayer traces the
campaign against global warming effectively.It employed some of the same personnel and used the same playbook as the
tobacco companies’ earlier effort to create doubt as to whether cigarettes
caused cancer—but evidently with far more significant results.(I am leaving out of this essay the names of
many key operatives within the network who have organized particular legal,
lobbying and electoral campaigns.They
are the battlefield commanders of our new political struggle.)The intellectual infrastructure also carries
out campaigns against academics and journalists who stand in its way—including Mayer
herself.

The other long-running campaign waged by the new right was
the attempt to undo a century of regulation of spending on political campaigns.
At the dawn of the Progressive Era a consensus emerged that the influence of
money on politics had to be restricted, and Watergate had reinforced that
lesson. But the counteroffensive against regulation began in the decade after
Watergate, won various victories, and culminated in the Citizens United
decision, the Kochs’ and their allies’ greatest and perhaps most influential
triumph.The floodgates are now open,
and the results are clear for all to see.

The right wing network gained much power over the Republican
Party by 2000 and was rewarded by very friendly Bush Administration policies
towards the energy industry, which turned fracking loose and set the US on the
path to energy independence.It could
not prevent a groundswell of negative feeling against the Bush Administration
in its second term, however, or stop the election of a Democratic Congress and
Barack Obama.But it went into high gear
to stop Obama from accomplishing very much.To begin with, implementing a long standing plan to form a mass base,
the Kochs and their allies took advantage of the financial crisis to get the
Tea Party movement going in 2009.Their
newly won financial power under Citizens United allowed them to intimidate
virtually every Republican Senator and Representative with the threat of
primary opposition, bringing them all into line for total opposition to the
President. The Kochs now hold seminars every year for Republican officeholders,
where they are informed in secret of the party line.They
convinced millions of Americans that the financial crisis was really the fault
of the federal government.When Obama
threatened the carried interest tax loophole, their lobbying organizations
found new allies among private equity titans and hedge fund managers on Wall
Street.All this enabled the
Republicans, backed by this network of plutocrats, to win their extraordinary
victory in the 2010 elections.After
redistricting was finished with the help of techniques provided by the same set
of conservative donors, the Republicans probably had secured control of the
House of Representatives for the rest of this decade.

The Koch network has also made a huge and successful effort
at the state level, making the Democratic Party irrelevant in large parts of
the nation.Originally founded with
Scaife money in the 1970s, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) now
writes draft anti-government, pro-business legislation for state legislatures
all over the country.Local Kochs have
also sprung up, such as Art Pope, a North Carolina discount store owner who in
the last decade has taken over the state Republican Party and orchestrated its
(now partial) takeover of the North Carolina state government.At the national level, ideological loyalties
are still strong enough to allow Democratic candidates to win the popular vote
in 4 of the last five Presidential elections, but at the local level, in red
and some purple states, there is no alternative force that can stand up to the
Koch-led network. And the ultraconservative domination of state legislatures
poses perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy of all: a constitutional
convention called by those legislatures which could rewrite key provisions of
the Constitution along more “libertarian” lines.

Another chapter of this story does not appear in Mayer’s
book.She finished it when Donald Trump’s
presidential candidacy had just begun, and he initially exchanged insults with
the Kochs, who did not trust him.Six
months into his Administration it seems to represent an unqualified victory. The Kochs had a long-standing connection to Mike Pence. The DeVos family—the founders of Amway, an
organization that has escaped serious legal trouble more than once—has also
been a long-standing member of the megadonor network with a particular interest
in education, and they have provided Trump with his education secretary.The EPA and the Department of Energy and
firmly in the hands of Koch allies and are now taking the skeptical line on
climate change.New rounds of tax cuts
are being prepared.The Kochs are undoubtedly
unhappy about the failure to repeal the ACA, but they now hold more levers of
power than they ever did.

A political revolution has been in progress for more than
four decades, a reaction to the New Deal and the more just society that it
created.Fueled by successive rounds of
tax cuts, this revolution has created a tiny group of billionaires that now
control most of our political life.This
is way, as a widely cited study by Marin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page discovered,
the beliefs of average American citizens and broad-based activist groups on key
issues have very little influence on policy outcomes, while the beliefs of interest
groups have a great deal. It's also why most Republicans will vote for legislation that will clearly hurt far more of their constituents than it will help. This is, I
believe, the new America that our current Fourth Turning has created, and like
the Gilded Age, it will not be overturned, in all probability, for a very long
time.

5 comments:

ProfessorGreat summary. I checked it out, at your suggestion, but decided I couldn’t get through it.You have noted in the past the connections of conservative Jews to the origins of the neocon movement. I had had no idea, really, about that. I am just guessing that the conservative funding ball Mayer discusses was handed off, fairly early, to the more numerous super wealthy gentile conservative stooges, who then ran with it.The more liberal Jews, who also funded the laissez faire globalization we are all now shackled with, were perhaps both better and bigger funders, big picture.It was, frankly, after all, the liberal post WWII system which dug us the hole we are in, not the rich gentile or Jewish conservatives, loathsome as they truly also are.All the best

The neocon movement of conservative Jews started somewhat later. It was triggered by the 1967 war and the Black Power movement--mainly the former, which showed Israel almost alone in the world. The Kochs, Bradleys, Olin and the rest of them had been active for some time at that point. Eventually, alliances were struck, and I believe the Weekly Standard, the main Neocon organ--run by Bradley award winner Bill Kristol--also gets funding from some of the people in Mayer's book.

ProfessorMany thanks for this note. I am planning to read a book called "Hollywood Left and Right" next. People tend to think of Hollywood as more left than right, but that seems not to have been the case re its influence on American politics.

Also bought a copy of "Jewish Power", but haven't touched it yet.All the best

There exists a popular misconception that money spent on marketing changes minds. In fact, marketing spending is powerless to effect change--particularly among buyers making the central, normative statement--in the absence of a well-conceived strategy. I believe (and believe I can prove) that the correct definition of a well-conceived strategy is one that confers a competitive advantage upon target buyers vis à vis other buyers (in this case voters or elected representatives).

Thus a more accurate (and arguably more engaging) title for the subject book and this post would be Dark Strategy.

Conservatives have accomplished something very difficult--the turning of the popular center--by effective implementation of their well-conceived strategy. As such, the conservative movement of the past 20 years provides a learnable moment to revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries everywhere, but only to those willing to abandon their faulty assumptions regarding money, power, and change.

An interesting idea:"And the ultraconservative domination of state legislatures poses perhaps the greatest threat to our democracy of all: a constitutional convention called by those legislatures which could rewrite key provisions of the Constitution along more “libertarian” lines."

Palmer has a wonderful chapter in The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Volume I, Ch. VIII. The American Revolution: The People as Constituent Power. It goes into some of the theoretical issues the Philadelphia Convention raised, and similar issues a convention such as you describe might also involve.

About Me

Since 1976 I have been a historian of international and domestic politics, as well as an authority on some of the more famous criminal cases in American history. For the past eight years I have been using this space to comment on current events. Links to my books, including, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008), appear above, at the top right corner of this page.. Simply click to learn more about them or to order them.
The email circulating widely attributed to me comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler is a forgery: see snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp.
Comments are welcome, but comments that are both abusive and anonymous will be deleted.